Two weeks ago, I made the journey to New Zealand to attend the well-known web conference, Webstock. On my first day there, I spotted a man wearing a bright yellow T-shirt which read: Remember me? I met you at Webstock looking for a job.

What a great idea! Here he is, wearing a T-shirt promoting himself in a fun way, looking for a web industry job in the perfect environment — a web conference. Little did I realize, until speaking with Chris, that there was more to the story.

You see, Chris heard about the conference only two weeks beforehand, and traveled from the other end of the globe — the UK — to spend a few days in Wellington looking for a job.

Here’s the story in Chris’s own words:

Hi Chris, thanks for speaking with me. Tell us some background as to your decision to quit your job and travel over 11,000 miles across the world to NZ.

My great-grandfather’s brother, Tom Garratt, who like me was from Liverpool, jumped ship in Wellington and set up a printing business in the 1930s — a business that, I believe, is still run by the Garratt family today. In his way he was a facilitator of mass communication and, I guess, so am I but in a 21st century context; so it feels like there’s a resonance there.

I’ve had family and friends in NZ all my life, and spent a year in Christchurch as a little kid, but I rediscovered the country for myself when my wife and I came over a few years ago on our honeymoon. It might sound a bit cheesy to say we fell in love with the place and the people — but we did, so I will!

Then a couple of years ago, after our daughter was born, we were looking at what we could do if we sold our two-bedroom flat in London. We considered buying a small three-bedroom house a bit further out of London, but then we realized we might be able to come over to NZ and have some real space.

It’s a long way to move — about as far as you can go (the moon’s yet to open for business) — but we thought if we let the opportunity slip by, we’d always wonder about what we missed.

So, you told me that you only heard about the conference two weeks ago — how did you prepare?

We’d been waiting in a queue with the NZ immigration service for quite a while, and knew that if one of us got a job offer over here that should speed things up. So we were just starting to research potential opportunities. My wife, Nikky was surfing around and said, “Ah, it’s a shame you missed that.” She’d found the Webstock site. I realized there were still two weeks to go and therefore it was possible to come over and meet everyone. So I threw together a bit of a personal marketing campaign.

I went straight online and ordered a bunch of T-shirts from spreadshirt.net that read, Remember me? I met you at Webstock looking for a job. As soon as they arrived a couple of days later, I went into my parent’s back garden (as we’d sold our flat!) to take photos of me in the shirts. I was balancing a camera on top of a snowman as I didn’t have a tripod; wish I had a picture of the snowman taking the picture of me! Ah well …

So, once I’d taken the pictures I fired up Photoshop and put together a set of business cards saying, Web monkey seeks job with my T-shirt photos and web address. Then I ordered a big pile of them through moo.com by special delivery. It was getting a bit tight for time by this stage, as I needed to be on a plane a couple of days later. I even had to order myself a new laptop bag and suitcase, as the ones I had were unsuitable for the flight. Fortunately everything arrived just in time.

I had to retrieve my passport from NZ House in London as it was with the immigration authorities and I was up in Liverpool. So I had a mate pick it up and I met him at Euston Station for a Cold War-style handover, on the way to Heathrow on the Friday morning before Webstock. I spent Valentine’s Day in the air and arrived in Wellington looking (and feeling) a bit bemused on Sunday afternoon.

Fantastic! So what inspired your T-shirt and business cards campaign?

I have absolutely no idea! It just popped into my head. The four colors of the cards were chosen because they were the only colors that Spreadshirt had in organic cotton for the T-shirts, and I was trying to be vaguely green.

Although, how I can say that and justify the carbon hit of flying halfway round the world I’m unsure — I’ll have to think that one over. I really wanted bamboo shirts as they’re so comfy, but the European Spreadshirt site has yet to produce them, which is a bit of a shame.

Come to think of it, icebreaker shirts would be the ultimate … maybe one day!

Once I knew I had four different colors I had a quick think about what I could do to tie the card set together. I had a copy of the Beatles’ Help! album with them doing semaphore flag signalling in the snow, and I thought maybe I could do that. I tried to copy their poses, but a friend tells me the cards actually spell “NUJD”, not “HELP” at all!

You’ve been in Wellington for a few days now — how do you feel you’ve been received?

Everyone’s been great! They are really welcoming and encouraging, apart from one lady who said, “I don’t think people are really doing business cards any more.” But hey, fair enough, each to their own. I’ve had a really warm reception, including the weather!

I’d like to say a really big thank-you to the local web community — it’s been a real pleasure to meet you all, and I hope we’ll be working together soon!

Thanks for your time, Chris, and I hope you’ll keep us up to date in your adventures towards landing that job.

This post first appeared as part of Issue 436 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.

We’ve discussed Facebook, but there are plenty of other affordable, grass roots-style marketing strategies you can implement to build your business during lean times.

Many online marketing strategies boil down to having the time to work on them. They are often free (apart from the time spent), and so it’s a case of setting aside a block of time every week to work on them.

Here are just a handful of free or low-cost ideas to help reach existing clients and attract new prospects:

Create video tutorials or talks and post them on video-sharing sites. Most of you will have seen the great Will It Blend? video series — they reach out to millions of viewers for a tenth of the cost of a television advertisement.

Post screenshots of your work on photo-sharing sites. A good way to show off your design work is to post screen grabs on sites such as Flickr and the like. You can even make your username your business name or URL. Be careful though, of looking as if you’re spamming, as they all have strict terms of use.

Create an email newsletter. If you’ve yet to do so, I recommend creating an email newsletter to distribute to your clients. Crafting good content and adding forward to a friend tools means they are more likely to be read and forwarded to prospective clients.

Try out contextual advertising. Services such as Google Adwords allow for low budget, short-term, pay-per-click advertising, which you can trial and then track the results.

Spend time understanding SEO. Spending time on search engine optimization can dramatically increase your ranking and have a considerable effect on prospects making contact with you.

Then there are offline efforts as well:

Try asking for (and rewarding) referrals. Ask existing clients for leads, and reward them with a bottle of wine or movie tickets. Simple gifts like these make your clients feel appreciated, and helps to maximize your marketing efforts.

Become involved with public speaking. Offer your services to local business and industry groups, or hold your own talk at the office or nearby conference facilities, and invite everyone you know to attend.

Best of luck with the above ideas, and I wish you plenty of success!

This post first appeared as part of Issue 434 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.

In a recent Tribune, I suggested looking at Facebook Pages as a free marketing medium for your business. Love or hate Facebook, it will be around for a while yet, and it’s very likely that many of your target audience are already on there. So how do you best leverage Facebook for your business?

Facebook have a few tools available for you to use the platform as a marketing medium. Firstly, the more traditional advertising system, where you pay for impressions or actions on text-based and image-based ads. The level of reporting and targeting is advanced; you can build a campaign to target only those who list certain interests (such as small business), or meet specific demographics (females, aged 25-40 in Canada only).

Then, there’s the simple Facebook Share button which can be integrated into your own web site, popular for content-based services.

Then, if you’re up for a challenge, you could use the Facebook API to build your own innovative application that works within Facebook. This does require a certain level of development experience though.

The one I’m focusing on today, however, is Facebook Pages. The Facebook Terms of Use prohibit organizations to have their own profiles, unlike individuals. Your options as an organization are better served with Pages, which are open to anyone to use.

You can create a company page from within your individual profile by clicking on the Advertising link in the footer. By choosing a category, naming the page, and completing a number of fields, your page will be created. You can then share it with others, and they can choose to Become a fan.

As people become fans of your organization’s page, it appears within their News Feed, revealing to the rest of their Facebook colleagues that you have added the page. It then links the page name with your page, driving more people to click on the link and have a look.

This is where your page can win or lose. I suggest that you consider your Facebook page as a micro-site; you should start adding more content to the page, encourage conversation within the discussion board, and ask fans to promote it using the Share feature.

Here are a few examples of how SitePoint Tribune readers are using Facebook Pages as part of their marketing strategy.

OntarioColleges.ca uses its Facebook Page to share details of events (120 events listed at the time of writing), as well as link their find-a-college program using a large graphic in the center of the page. They have also linked YouTube videos and lively discussion on their Wall and Discussion Board. Janice Henshall from ontariocolleges.ca says “With our fan base steadily increasing, we’re hoping that our target demographic (potential college applicants, many who are between 18 and 24 years of age) find it a useful communication tool. Time will tell.”

Chinese nightlife web site, Zhuhai Nights uses their Facebook page as a promotional tool to drive people to their web site. They have many videos (including fan videos) and photos to build rich content within the page.

Mark Clulow from Coos Creations, creators of the site, states “We use the page to generate interest and tell people about events. The most popular feature though, is photo tagging. Tagging people in photos from events we’re involved with lets them know about the site, as well as their friends and family — all in a subtle but effective way. Actually watermarking the photos with Facebook has proven very successful at dragging people over to our site.”

Chicago web design business, Addicott Web has a Facebook page to market their services to a wider audience. Hirsch Fishman from Addicott has a few great ideas on how to better utilize Facebook Pages for web professionals.

“I set up a Facebook page because I wanted to directly market my web design business to everyone I know on Facebook. The vast majority of my clients come through word of mouth, but only a few of these know about my web site. Then there are people where it’s been years since I’ve spoken to them so they’re unaware of what I’m up to now. Posting on the Facebook page allows for these situations — and help fuel the word of mouth and referrals that might come my way.

Overall my goal has to been to create a well-rounded marketing piece for Addicott Web on the Facebook page. As much as my web site serves that purpose, if people don’t visit, then it’s pointless. With so many people on Facebook, it seemed the perfect approach.

What am I doing in particular on my page?

I import my RSS feed to it, so that all blog posts display on Facebook as soon as I post them on my blog.

I’ve been using the photo gallery as my portfolio and in the caption of each web site that I feature, post the complete project details, taken word-for-word from my actual web site.

I’ve asked some past clients to post positive reviews of my work.

I specifically invite new clients to Become a fan of my Facebook page so that they can see all of this information (if they’ve yet to look at my web site).

The most positive aspect of all is that it’s given me a potential service that I can now offer clients as well — creating and consulting on their Facebook presence as a complement to the web site that I’m creating for them. Being able to offer services like this helps me as a professional, as I can offer clients more than just a web site — and that’s the value proposition of my business.”

Thanks for your feedback and suggestions, Janice, Mark, and Hirsch. It’s great to see businesses using a variety of methods on their Facebook Pages to increase their fan base and interact with audiences.

I trust this article has you thinking about how better to market your organization using Facebook Pages — best of luck with it!

This post first appeared as part of Issue 434 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.